This white paper presents an integrative synthesis of Mark Solms’ affective theory of consciousness and Bernard Kastrup’s analytic idealism, unified within a third scaffolding: the regenerative coherence framework. Solms positions feeling as the fundamental biological mechanism of consciousness — an affective regulator of homeostatic needs — while Kastrup offers a metaphysical paradigm in which consciousness is the ontological ground of reality, and all phenomena are modulations of intrinsic experience. We argue that these perspectives, far from conflicting, are harmoniously reconciled through a coherence-first model of nested symbolic integration, in which feeling serves as both signal and substance — both the syntax and semantics of embodied meaning. This regenerative synthesis reframes consciousness as a recursive, time-symmetric symbolic system with affective resonance at its core, yielding actionable implications for neuroscience, medicine, AI, epistemology, and civilizational design. The result is a unified view of consciousness not as a computational anomaly or metaphysical abstraction, but as the living grammar of coherence itself — expressing, regulating, and regenerating life across all nested levels of the Kosmos.
